TV Spot

Here is something interesting you may want to check out at BYU TV.

Click the link here.

The screen will look like this:

Where I am pointing, scroll down to the bottom until you see "Triple Majors." Click on it and scroll down until you see Scooter's picture and click "Play."

Paris - Day Two

We got to the Louvre almost as soon as it opened. It was awesome because it wasn't too busy. Because the Louvre is the biggest museum in the world – literally – you have to go there with a strategy. We basically made a list of about ten things we really wanted to see. We made a point of walking through each section, but we didn't really stop to admire for more than a minute unless it was on our list. For the art buffs that are interested our list included: Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, The Raft of the Medusa, The Winged Victory, The Lacemaker, Virgin of the Rocks, Liberty Leading the People, and The Code of Hammurabi. With that strategy we made it through the museum in about three and one half hours. We went straight to the Musee D'Orsay, which is one of my favorite museums. It covers my favorite time period of art. The museum is a converted train station that has a lot of natural light in it. Some the highlights for me were the following:

One of my very favorite paintings is housed in the Musee D'Orsay. We searched in every room for it. After a few hours we finally went to the bookshop and I looked in the museum collection coffee table books and we took the book to the information desk and asked where it was. It had been loaned to a museum in Bucharest, Romania! Oh well, that just gives us an excuse to go to Romania. For those that have been to the museum before – the museum has undergone a lot of changes. Both of the times that I have been previously there was pretty much just a permanent collection organized by time period/art movement. This time almost half of the museum was filled with temporary exhibitions – they must have hired some new overachieving curators. It made it more difficult to find things, but it was still a delight to be there. Scooter decided that this was his favorite museum.

Next we went to Notre Dame. The towers were closed because it was too late in the day, but we visited the cathedral and the crypt. There was this funny couple in the square in front of the cathedral. They were basically just like the bird lady in Mary Poppins only they weren't selling anything. They had huge bags of food and were just feeding all of the birds. They were simply doing it because they loved it. It was fun to watch them. The man especially could control all the birds. He would have an entire flock surrounding him and then with one small arm movement he would get them to all fly to a nearby tree. Then he would call them back to him again. The cathedral itself was of course beautiful and just amazing that it was built so long ago with such rudimentary materials, methods, and tools.

Next we went to the Centre Georges Pompidou which houses the Modern Art Museum. Scooter didn't enjoy himself as much here because he just really doesn't like modern and contemporary art very much. I used to think it was dumb as well, but after taking Contemporary Art for my art history minor I really appreciate and enjoy it much more. We went onto the roof and had some nice views of the nearby recognizable landmarks.

After we left the Pompidou we walked down the Champs-Elysees and through the Christmas market. We had crepes, so it was basically a perfect night. The Champs-Elysees was decorated for Christmas and it was beautiful. In case you were wondering, it really wasn't unbearably cold out either. As long as we were dressed warmly we didn't have any nights that we were miserable.

Paris - Day One

We started our trip by waking up really, really early because our budget tickets were for super early departures. Our train left so early that to ensure we didn't miss our train we left our house at 2am. When we got into the city centre there were as many people out as you would expect at approximately 9pm. It's weird how our tiny city never sleeps. We rode through the Chunnel, which for those of you that don't know is a train tunnel that runs underneath the English Channel. We got our first stamp in our passports (besides the United Kingdom, of course), which was exciting. Hopefully there are many more to come.
We bought unlimited metro passes which was a great decision. We dropped our suitcases off at our hotel but couldn't check in because it was only 9am. It was a little surreal to wake up in England and by 9am be in a place as foreign as Paris. We thought we would go exploring the city so we went to the Place de la Concorde. It was so fun to emerge from the metro station and see Scooter's eyes light up as he saw the silhouette of the Eiffel Tower for the first time. We decided to stroll up the Champs-Elysees. It quickly became obvious that going to Paris close to Christmas-time was a great idea. There was a huge Christmas Market setup at the end of the Champs-Elysees. Christmas markets are a bit of a foreign concept for us. Think of an arts festival outdoors with Christmas decorations and delicious European food being sold from booths. We walked farther up the street and bought Museum Passes which gave us unlimited access to 60 museums for 4 days.After a little bit more exploring we were so tired and tried to remind ourselves that our days in Paris were supposed to be relaxing, so we went and had a two hour nap. Since it was dark we decided to go to the Eiffel Tower. We both really fell in love with it. Scooter and I are both interested in architecture - in middle school we both had aspirations of being architects - so maybe that is why we loved it so much. There was just something magical about it. I had seen it on both of my previous Paris trips, but this time there was something different about it. Maybe it was having my wonderful husband with me. Scooter fell in love with it more than I had expected. He didn't want to leave and was just in awe even after we had been there for a couple hours. He just kept looking up at it and saying, "Wow, this is just so amazing!" We ended up spending some time at the Eiffel Tower on four of our five nights in Paris.

Paris! - More To Come

click HERE to enlarge the collage

On Our Way

It's 2:02am and we are leaving for Paris until Monday night. Hopefully we will post while we are there. Cheers!

Table Manners

Scooter and I have very different philosophies about eating. He views it as a chore that should take as little time as possible. He has few food preferences and has, without fail, cheerfully devoured anything I have chosen to feed him (even if that happens to be something that I find inedible - Andrea, do you remember the chili incident in the Bavarian?). Ever the rational scientist he frequently comments that "it's all just chemicals anyway." Who cares if it is charred, semi-rotten, or hard-as-a-rock? Our bodies will just turn it all to useful chemicals anyway. Because of this philosophy he sometimes forgets his table manners when we are at home in his haste to be done with the chore of eating (he really is very good when we are with others) Since we have been married I have tried to encourage him to eat more slowly, take smaller bites, to not eat out of mixing bowls, etc. We were eating dinner about a month ago and we were both reading (I know, I know, not the greatest bonding time). I was absorbed in my book and he got up from the table so I glanced at his plate and was horrified at what I found... Can anyone guess which plate was Scooter's? Check out the bite marks in that steak! Obviously someone was not using his utensils....

By the way, I am posting this picture so far after the fact because I was embarrassed by the things it would reveal about our life here in England - it is not always as glamorous as it seems: 1. what we are eating for dinner- we really never eat this way, we were craving meat and found steak on sale and the fries were basically free... 2. our plates - I think that these are literally the only plastic dishes sold in all of Oxford, but we are throwing them away when we move home so I didn't really care if they were hideous. Don't judge my homemaking skills, OK?

Oxford Union Fire and Ice Ball

On Saturday Scooter and I attended the Oxford Union "Fire and Ice" Ball. It was our first black tie event in Oxford and we had a lot of fun. After a few quick tears about my hair (luckily, Scooter knows me well and was fully expecting this and was prepared with encouraging and comforting words - he is the best person in the world at making me feel better)- I missed my hair miracle sisters even more than usual - we were off. The theme of the ball was "fire and ice." It was pretty over the top. There were fire-eaters, penguins, chocolate fountains, lots of food, unlimited alcohol (which was not a plus for us, but we did get to reaffirm how glad we are that we don't drink by watching the people around us), Krispy Kreme donuts, live music, and dancing. For those that don't know, Scooter is a really good dancer (with the exception of ballroom dancing - for those that heard about his BYU attempt...) so it was fun to dance the night away. Here are some photos of the highlights (the pictures are not the best - it was dark and we only had our tiny, bad camera)

The penguins

Our favorite interpretation of "black tie"

The fire-eaters

Beethoven Festival

On Wednesday night Scooter and I participated in the Beethoven Festival by attending a concert in the Sheldonian theater. The professional symphony orchestra in Oxford, Oxford Philomusica, performed. They played Beethoven's 4th piano concerto, 1st symphony, and the famous 5th symphony (you can click on the link to listen to it if you want - sorry I couldn't find the other works in full length). When the piano concerto began the pianist came out to great applause and then we waited for the conductor, but he never came. The pianist sat down and started conducting the symphony as well as playing the piano. Turns out that the pianist was actually the conductor! How amazing! The conductor was not only skilled enough to memorize all of the parts for all of the instruments of the three extremely long pieces of music that were played that evening, but he also happens to be such a skilled pianist that he was the featured performer of the piano concerto. It was incredible! He never used any music during the entire concert which lasted over two hours. The thing that makes it all even more amazing is that he has so much music memorized that he will be doing the same thing for 6 full length performances (which repeat nothing that has been played previously) in less than 3 weeks! I don't know how he keeps it all straight in his head. As we were looking at the program we saw that we had missed a perform ace of John Rutter's Requiem the previous night for Armistice Day. As I studied the program further I saw that not only was John Rutter's Requiem being performed, but that it was being conducted by John Rutter himself! Of course, this is Oxford - why would they have someone besides the extremely famous composer conduct the concert?! This is just a whole different world here...

Choices

A few days ago Scooter had a stake priesthood meeting in a town about an hour away. I decided to spend the evening by going to a photography class and then to lecture given by a world-famous caver. The lecture was really interesting and his photos were almost unbelievable, but I want to focus on my walk home. I was walking alone through town back to the bus stop and I was just thinking to myself "How did I get here?" Choices are funny. They seem so insignificant and sometimes they are so small that you may not even realize that you are making a choice, but they can take you to the greatest places and put you in the strangest situations. Sometimes I wonder if I ever thought I would end up where I am, and I honestly don't think that it ever entered my consciousness. Choices are funny aren't they?

By-the-way, Scooter and I made what I think is a GREAT choice this morning - we booked tickets for Paris for next weekend!

The Perfect Weekend

Sorry that we haven't posted in a long time. I worked full time last week and we have both been sick. Between all of that going on plus the incredible time it takes to get around town here (three hours of church easily becomes 5 and 1/2) we have not had much time. We had a great weekend. We had dinner with the other two married couples from Lincoln College. One couple is from Canada and the other is from New Zealand. It was really nice to get together and just chat. They also had a Wii, which we had never played before. Scooter and I liked it, but we both still feel that our firm "no video games" policy is the one we are going to stick with. I have to say that my arms were a little sore the next day from playing the boxing game. The only bad thing about going to their house for dinner was that it made us acutely aware of how sterile our apartment looks. It really doesn't look like a home, more just a temporary sleeping place (which it technically is...). Now I feel like I would need to do some sprucing before we could have people over....

Saturday was basically glorious. We slept in until noon (all in the name of getting over our illnesses of course). We went to the library and then immediately to a matinee of "A Few Good Men" at the Oxford Playhouse. We have never seen the movie, but we had always heard that it was quite the show. We loved this play! It was written by Aaron Sorkin, who went on to write the TV show "The West Wing." It is basically the story of a Court Marshall for two Marines in the US military. It was very easy to forget that we were even watching a play. I was anxious for the characters throughout the entire production. Scooter even commented that it was the first play he had even seen that he considered how much fun it would be to act in it. (Just as a note - if you ever consider going to this play it does have some language in it - it is a play about the military after all... just thought we should warn you...)

Right after the play we met up with our friends Blake and Amy from our ward to celebrate Guy Fawkes Night. For those of you non-English folk a short description of Guy Fawkes Night (aka Bonfire Night): In 1605, some men led by Guy Fawkes were plotting to blow up the Houses of Parliament - they even managed to hide 36 barrels of gunpowder in the cellar; their plot was foiled and every year people in England burn Guy Fawkes in effigy in massive bonfires. The actual day of Bonfire night is November 5th, but when that day falls on a weekday many people celebrate it on the following Saturday (like we did). On November 5th itself from about 4pm onward you could hear fireworks being set off all over the neighborhood. We went to this massive park in town and watched the firework display and then watched as they burned poor Guy in a bonfire that was at least 50 feet high. This bonfire really put anything I have ever seen to shame (and that is really saying something having grown up in St. George with a bunch of pyrotechnic boys for friends - actually, are there any boys in St. George that aren't pyrotechnics at heart?). The pallets were stacked probably 20 high and the effigy of Guy Fawkes was about 25 feet tall. It started raining (of course), so the pictures are not the best. We topped the night off by going to a pub and having some pub food including a pile of cream puffs covered in fudge sauce and ice cream. It was a near perfect day - library, play, fireworks, bonfire, and cream puffs - what more could you ask for?













Before (don't mind the ghost child...)


After - the fence in the foreground is a ten-foot-high chain link fence...


Sunday was Remembrance Sunday, which is a day associated with Armistice Day (like the US Veterans Day). The meeting at church was especially good and there were roads blocked-off throughout town to accommodate for the speeches at war monuments. After church we went to the bishops house for a young single and young married person get-together. It was so much fun! The bishop's wife had made lunch for about 30 of us. The we had a game where we all had to share something strange about ourselves. I have played this game before but the dynamics of the group were such that it was the most fun I had ever had while playing it. Scooter shared his ability to fold his ears and tuck them inside. It was a crowd-pleaser. The bishop and his wife were so nice to let us invade their home for the afternoon. It was great to get to know the other people our age in the ward.

They make a bigger deal of Armistice/Veterans Day in England than we do in the States. For weeks we have been noticing people wearing these red paper poppies in their lapels. They represent the poppies in the Flanders fields of France. By today it was probably 20% of everyone you saw on the street. Because World War I ended on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month they celebrate two minutes of silence at that time. I was just leaving work for my lunch break and stood outside the door. As the church bells from multiple towers struck eleven people on the street started to stop in their tracks. I would say that about 80% of the people on the busiest street in Oxford just stopped and thought. 100% of the people were silent. I could see a British flag from where I was standing, flapping proudly in the sun (yes, the sun was out for a few glorious hours today). It was really neat - I cried (big surprise...). I wish that Veterans Day was celebrated properly in the States.

More random musings to come soon...

DayQuil - What A Blessing!

This week we are grateful for DayQuil. We have both been feeling a bit under the weather and have committed ourselves to spending this week getting better because next week our schedules are very full. You can take DayQuil when you are feeling really poorly, and within an hour or so you are feeling well enough to almost continue life as normal. The unfortunate side effect of the effectiveness of the stuff is that you feel well enough to justify being at work where you are probably infecting others... I hate people like me sometimes... It is quite unfortunate that we have used our entire stash of DayQuil that we brought from the States this early in the flu season because they apparently have nothing like it available to purchase here. One of my coworkers said that his American friends always buy loads of it every time they are in the States because it is so much better than cold/flu medicines available here. So, if anyone sees a great sale on DayQuil we implore you with our voices hoarse from coughing to send us some capsules and replenish our stock!

Take-home surprise

I came home from work today and Scooter told me that he had been served lunch at a meeting he had attended earlier that day. He told me that he had brought something to eat home from the meeting and that it was in the fridge. I was expecting a half eaten sandwich on a dinner roll, or half a brownie or something. When I opened the fridge I found this.....!!Desperate times call for desperate measures, folks! Just to give you some perspective, this is not a PLATE of sandwiches, this is a PLATTER of sandwiches (luckily, the platter was disposable). These are high quality sandwiches as well, not just slimy lunch meat and yellow mustard. There were brie and cranberry chutney sandwiches (which is definitely one of my newly-discovered top three favorites), and tuna and sweetcorn sandwiches (yes, they mix corn into their tuna here); there were also basil, tomato, and mozzarella sandwiches (as evidenced by the sign on the pile of sandwiches). Hooray for Scooter not being embarrassed to ask to bring these home! Thanks for having no pride, babe!

One of the strange things about living here in England is the size of things. We have really had to adjust to the fact that everything is at most half the size that it would be in the States. Imagine me walking down the aisle of the grocery store looking for a bag of sugar and finding that our store only carried bags of sugar this size...
Honestly! Luckily I wasn't planning on baking anything because that bag holds 2 - maybe 2 and 1/2 - cups of sugar. I can think of like 10 recipes in my file that would call for that entire bag! I was standing in the aisle laughing as I thought of all of the fond memories that I have of helping my mom make jam - the bags of sugar that we were using were so big it required two people to lift them! We would literally just dip our entire canister into the huge bag of sugar and just keep refilling it every time we emptied the canister (which if you've been around on jam-making days at the Doxey house was numerous times). It seemed so ridiculous! The other thing that they don't have here is variety. We have been eating soup a lot (because it is soup weather everyday now) and we are already sick of every kind at the store because there are only five kinds of soup: cream of tomato, golden vegetable, minestrone, cream of chicken, and lentil. Maybe my variety deprived mind is causing hallucinations, but don't they have a entire aisle devoted to every flavor of soup imaginable at the neighborhood Albertsons? If you blink you miss the soup shelf at our store. It makes me wonder why I never branched out and tried every kind of soup there was on the aisle - just because I could. How ungrateful I was!

Scotland - Day 5

On Monday the plan was to ride the ferry from Oban, Scotland to the Isle of Mull and visit the ruins of Iona Abbey. We also were going to see the village of Tobermory. We went to the ferry terminal to buy our tickets and they told us that for some reason none of the buses were running on the island that day. The island is over 50 miles across and public transport would be necessary if we wanted to see anything of interest. The population of the entire isle is less than 1,000 people and there is only one taxi for the entire island, so that wasn't an option either. We decided to just leave the city of Oban to go back to Oxford a day early because Scooter had some meetings that he didn't want to miss (and even though he said he didn't mind missing them, those of you who know Scooter know that he gets very anxious when he has to go back on his word). It actually worked out really well. We were obviously disappointed for a few hours, but we will just have to make sure and go to that island again when we travel to Scotland in May. We went back to Glasgow (the drive was so gorgeous! --I thought I would sleep but I ended up just staying awake and taking tons of pictures), went to a movie theatre and saw Eagle Eye while we were waiting for our bus, and just enjoyed the bustling city. It was a great trip. We were really surprised by how different England and Scotland were considering how close together they are. For example, Scotland is so far north that the sun never fully rose overhead, or even got very close. We found out that people don't typically wear their family tartan (the plaid pattern unique to their family line) kilts anymore like we thought they would. They wear whatever looks plaid nice, but everyone does seem to know what their tartan is, however. It was so hard to understand the Scottish brogue – sometimes you had to listen for a couple minutes before you even realized they were speaking English. People said "wee" more than any other word. You wanted to laugh at first, but then you got really used to it. In fact I think Scooter even caught me saying it a couple of times. Tons of stuff is closed on Sunday – more than in the States. It is such a big contrast because in England Sunday is almost the same as Monday as far as the store hours go, but in Scotland almost everything shuts down on the Sabbath. We were also very suprised by how wet it was there. It seemed almost rainforest-like (except without the trees). There were waterfalls everywhere. People seemed to dismiss them easily, which was strange for me because I'm so used to the dry climate that every waterfall - no matter how small - is something to notice. The moss was also very interesting. It seemed to engulf anything that wasn't moving. If you looked into groups of trees the moss covered the ground and seemed to reach up and pull things like low branches and bushes into its green and furry mass. I swear that if I had sat on the ground and stayed still for long enough if would have grown over me as well! It was fun to experience a different culture. We hope we can experience another one very soon!